Development of Ten-Moment Fluid Models for Magnetized Plasmas

Laboratory plasmas are oftentimes not in local thermal equilibrium, as their dynamics can evolve on timescales faster than the collisional timescale. However, high-resolution kinetic simulations of device-scale physics can be prohibitively expensive. Thus, leveraging fluid moment models, which can capture finite kinetic effects at a much lower computational cost, would greatly benefit predictive modeling of HED plasmas. The 10-moment model is a fluid moment model that directly evolves a full anisotropic pressure tensor, relaxing the assumption of isotropic local collisional equilibrium that is made by most existing fluid models. First, I will present electrostatic and electromagnetic 10-moment results to study how anisotropy can affect the transport & instability growth in magnetized plasmas. Second, I will present results demonstrating how a moment model can act as an algorithmic accelerator for implicit particle-in-cell schemes in the high-order low-order (HOLO) framework. I will show electrostatic and electromagnetic results showing the ability of the HOLO scheme to take timesteps far larger than the explicit limit.